Yalın Karadoğan (LeapFrog Investments)
Climate focused growth equity investment in emerging markets - TRVC 28
One of the reasons I have always been drawn to venture capital and entrepreneurship is that they are ultimately about change. Entrepreneurs build new products, challenge incumbents, and solve problems in new ways. Investors provide the capital that allows those ideas to scale. When the system works well, capital doesn’t just generate returns, it enables innovation.
This week’s guest on TRVC, Yalın Karadoğan, is doing just that. After nearly three decades in private equity and growth equity at firms including JP Morgan Partners and Cinven, Yalın joined LeapFrog Investments, one of the world’s leading impact investment firms. Today, he focuses on investing in companies that both provide financial returns and make a contribution to the climate challenges ahead.
While Turkey is outside LeapFrog’s geographic investment mandate, Yalın remains actively involved in the Turkish ecosystem through the Türkiye Mozaik Foundation, a “charity of charities” that supports high-impact non-profit organizations working across a range of social issues in Turkey.
In a sense, he represents a broader trend that I find encouraging: members of the Turkish diaspora who have built successful international careers in investing, entrepreneurship, and technology, while continuing to contribute to Turkey in meaningful ways.
Our conversation explores the idea of impact investing: the belief that capital can be deployed in ways that generate attractive returns while also addressing important challenges in areas such as climate, healthcare, and financial inclusion.
In the episode we discuss:
• Why some of the world’s most sophisticated institutional investors are allocating capital to impact-focused strategies, how that pendulum has swung an where it is settling.
• The role of growth equity in helping companies scale solutions to large societal problems
• The relationship between philanthropy and investing
• Climate investing, emerging markets, and the opportunities created by long-term structural change
One of my takeaways from the conversation was that philanthropy and investing are often presented as separate worlds. But perhaps they are better thought of as complementary tools: some problems are best addressed through charitable giving. Others require entrepreneurs, sustainable business models, and long-term capital. The most interesting challenge is figuring out where each approach works best.
This episode is in Turkish.
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